


Left and Leaving

by gloss



Category: Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Blow Jobs, Getting the Band Back Together, Kes DADmeron, M/M, Nature Hikes, OTP Feels, PostWar, Reunion, ecosystems of Yavin-IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 23:45:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13646925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: On the tenth anniversary of the peace treaties, celebrations are more sedate than in previous years. It is the Year of Reflection: suggested by the new Jedi, adopted by most of the free states.Finn finally visits Yavin-IV.





	Left and Leaving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galacticproportions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/gifts).



> Happy birthday to GP, without whom....well, a lot of things, so many. I borrowed an observation from your visit to redwoods for this. Thank you for being my friend and so consistently inspiring me.
> 
> Thanks to Orchis for beta'ing. Title from The Weakerthans song.
> 
> This stands on its own but also leads somewhere new? Kind of like friendship!

> _why all the living so strive to hush all the dead_ \-- **Moby-Dick**

On the tenth anniversary of the peace treaties, celebrations are more sedate than in previous years. It is the Year of Reflection: suggested by the new Jedi, adopted by most of the free states.

Rather than travel to any of the Inner Core ceremonies, Poe stays on Yavin-IV. In the morning, he and BB-8 attend the memorial service at the Force Tree. He was scheduled to speak but technical difficulties save him from that. Afterwards, as soon as he can, he heads home to strip off his dress uniform. It is snug enough now to emphasize his hips and belly enough for comment. In a shapeless singlet and old fatigues that might have been his father's, but are small enough to fit him, so they were probably his mother's, he hikes into the heart of the forest. 

He keeps going long after sweat has drenched him three times over. Sunburn across his nose, hair flattened to his skull, breath coming shallow and harsh, he presses on.

The birds and insects hoot and chatter above him. The light slants downward in half-opaque sheets, filled with the motion of bugs and circulation of pollen. The forest canopy is its own world, another society suspended far off the uneven ground. If he could, he would climb hand over hand, meter after meter, up there, until his head broke through the last leaves weaving the canopy, until he could turn his face to the sun. He could be plant and fungus and elaborate microorganism then, drawn to the light, flourishing in its radiance.

Instead, he pulls off his boots and sheds his clothes. He's made it to the spring. A cleave in some rocks, an accumulation of mud, the slow exhalation of water better discerned in how the texture of the mud changes, the surface shines, than directly: that's the spring. His father found it, decades ago now. Republican scientists had to confirm the fact, make a fact out of experience and anecdote, but now, irrevocably, Kes Dameron is identified as the discoverer of the headwaters of the Río Niv.

"I was just thirsty!" he will say when the topic comes up, shaking his head, grinning abashedly. The modesty is mostly sincere, but at its heart, there is in fact hard, bright pride. Forget Endor, or anything else he did with the Pathfinders. Other than fatherhood, finding the spring is Kes's proudest achievement in life. "Depends on what this one gets up to," he usually adds, jerking his thumb at Poe, "so most of the time, the spring _is_ my best moment."

Poe pushes aside some lobe-leafed gargantua and spiky ferns and his bare feet sink into the cool mud. The spring's water is more broad than deep, but a grown man can squat in it up to his chest. He does so, hugging his knees, digging his chin against his rebuilt knee cap. The water surrounds him, too shallow yet for anything like a current. When the afternoon's storm opens the sky, he tips back his head and lets the rain wash over him. It hits and skips against his skin, across the spring water. Rapid bombardment that joins the noise of the forest, challenges the birds and stirs up the bugs. Several drops per pore, opening him up, digging deep.

He crab-walks downstream a little ways. The mud gives way to flat pebbles and rocks, the water grows clearer and stronger. He swims in one of the first pools, disturbing a small school of thumb-sized sunprawn; they swirl and dart over him anxiously. 

Among the roots of an enormous goldtrunk tree, he pauses to float on his back. The goldtrunk tips over him, a trick of perspective that is also an emotional truth. Goldtrunks are ancient, already towering at the height of the Old Republic, so old and tall and grand that they manage to be people as well as places. He rests the back of his head against one knob of root, hooks a leg over another, and floats there, caught between air and water, light and dark, tree and ground and stream.

Suspended here, he is a visitor, and it is easy to pretend he belongs, that he's part of everything.

The sky billows and recedes in rough lozenges between the leaves and branches and birds. He addresses it, the blank white light, aloud. He names everyone he can remember who did not make it. Snap, Statura, Solo, Pava, Skywalker, Paige Tico and Ello, and on, and on, techs caught in the fire-bombing of the temporary base on T'loc, comms experts infected by the crystalline brain virus, those sliced open by light sabers, those left behind during hasty, disorganized retreats. X-Wings spiralling down to toxic methane clouds, bacta tanks slowly leaking dry, life snatched away, life ebbed away. Quick and slow, agonized and unconscious. He names planets and settlements, battle cruisers and double-agent droids. He runs out of names well before he's made a dent in the legions of the dead.

No one is dead so long as you remember them, a nice person told him when he was small and his mother was dead. He knew then, already, that was wrong: when no one's left to remember you, _that_ is real peace. Until then, it's a half-life, turbulent and miserable, haunted with regrets and longing.

His hair is silver now, there's a persistent knot in his left shoulder from years of clutching an X-Wing's joystick, his knee will never not faintly ache at the best of times. He still remembers.

Tears and sweat share the same salty sting and mix in his eyes as Poe hikes back up the river. It shrinks as he goes, sheds rocks and relaxes currents, returns to mud and a slight upwelling of extra moisture.

His clothes are almost dry; his boots, not so much. He perches on an outcropping to lace them up, then overbalances and ends up on his ass. More comfortable down here, actually, warm rock under his back, a few birds exchanging lazy gossip over him. He digs out his dad's flat metal ration box from his back pocket and lights a spice bidi.

Who's going to catch him? He's a middle-aged man, respected veteran, pillar of the community. All the same, he tenses a little at first, conscious of old transgressions, before the smoke unfurls through his veins and he forgets to worry very much at all.

"There you are."

The sun is behind the figure, and Poe's all the way down here, half-stoned and all the way exhausted, so what he makes out is: big shape of a man, all shoulders, shadowy, sounds friendly.

"Where am I?" he replies and shades his eyes, bidi smoldering in his fingers.

"Right here," the man says, drops to one knee, then effortlessly unfolds back into an easy crouch. He puts a hand on Poe's shoulder and squeezes. "It's good to see you."

"Finn," Poe says as his tired old synapses finally engage. "Where'd you come from?"

He hasn't seen Finn since just after the first anniversary of the treaties. They disagreed about something important, maybe more than one thing. Maybe it was the new Jedi's power-sharing, or the proposed location of the temple, maybe also the rate and volume of reparation payments to formerly occupied systems. What emerged from the tumult of argument and miscommunication was the sad truth that they needed a breather. Some time apart, get things sorted out, figure out what they wanted.

 _You_ , Poe was too angry, too hurt, too sullen and disappointed, to say. He thought of saying it, making it an accusation, wondering if Finn would flinch or laugh or give in, then decided he didn't want to risk it. _That's all I want now._

 _That's all you have now,_ Finn might have said, as reasonable as ever, and it didn't matter that it was true. He couldn't hear it.

Time did its thing, unspooling, pushing ahead. Poe got comfortable here on Yavin, dabbled in local politics, set up a goat-lizard hide and dyeing collective with Karé Kun and his dad. Then it was the fifth anniversary, the sixth, the seventh.

"Where'd I come from?" Finn echoes and smiles. Of course his smile hasn't changed, that would be stupid if it had. Poe is surprised and relieved anyway to see that it's just the same, just as wide and bright and all-encompassing as it ever was. "That's a story and a half."

His hand's still on Poe's shoulder. Poe scoots closer, bringing mud and fallen leaves with him, and offers Finn the bidi. Like he's a new cadet again, desperately and clumsily flirting with Muran by offering him good spice, shitty liquor, anything that might get him noticed and appreciated.

"What's this?" Finn asks even as he purses his lips and inhales.

"Local specialty," Poe tells him, accepting the bidi as Finn passes it back and taking another hit. 

Finn has some gray frosted over his hair, which is much longer these days, twisted up into locs the length of Poe's index finger. But his face is unlined, his eyes are warm and kind, he's _Finn_.

"I'm gross," Poe says when the light catches Finn's clean jersey. He tries to move away.

"Come back," Finn tells him and tightens his grip. His hand moves up to the back of Poe's neck, fingers twisting in his damp hair, and Poe is way ahead of him, scrabbling forward to kiss him, smear mud down his shirt, pull him closer yet.

They were never not excellent at this, touching each other, anticipating and pushing, working up delicately branching pleasures every bit as skillfully as big, shattering desire. Poe used to daydream, too, about bringing Finn here, showing him Yavin and the temples and the forest, the spring, these rocks. Here he is now, silver-haired and achy, kissing Finn like it's the first or second time, like there's so much time in front of them and a war to win and victory to savor, like he knows what the hell he's doing and why.

Finn clutches at Poe's head with both hands, kisses him like he's drinking down; the sun paints his face in bursts of red and gold. "I missed you," he whispers against Poe's throat, and gasps when Poe cups him, squeezes, then again. "Oh, _fuck_."

"Help me out here--" Poe says, tugging open Finn's flies, misjudging the angle, rearranging. "I can't do this alone."

Finn laughs at that, slow as the spring rises, and hugs him before lying down and taking Poe with him. He ends up streaked with mud and sweat, jersey twisted up, trousers around one ankle, and Poe kneeling between his legs, mouth on his cock, hand on his balls. Poe looks up, smiles, like he'd done a thousand times in the past, and the man who looks back down and touches his temple is still Finn, after all this time.

Nothing is different, everything has changed, shifted out its familiar slots in memory, caught new angles of light, returned upside down or sideways. Finn's louder when he comes now, but he tastes just the same. Poe has difficulty getting to his feet now, but he kisses Finn and grinds against him every bit as enthusiastically as he used to.

"I want to know why you're back," Poe says as they hike back to the house. "But not yet."

"Works for me," Finn replies and kisses him again, pushed up against a shaggy goldtrunk, searchingly.

Twilight blooms halfway through their hike, softening the edges of branches and rocks, obscuring some details while picking out others, like the descending swarms of widow-moths, furry-winged and inquisitive, and the prickle of starlight above.

By the time they reach the clearing and the house is in sight, it's night for real, chillier, the dark far sharper and more conclusive than it had been earlier. They smoke another bidi in the bath-shack, wash up and make out some more, before dashing naked to the main house.

"Ssssh," Poe says, grinning at a joke he forgot to share, "keep it down!" But neither is making more noise than what accompanies a body through space, skin brushing skin, tongues on lips.

They sleep on a broad bed, Poe wrapped around Finn, finding the old position without thinking about it.

*

In the morning, Finn wakes with a start, unused to the hot, sudden sun and the steaminess. He sits up, about to say something to Poe, when he realizes he's alone in the room. It is fairly empty, nothing like any room he once associated with Poe, all of which were crammed with stuff, nearly shouting with chaos. Here, there is room for all the light. Green-tinged, the light even makes the linens twisted around his waist seem slightly uncanny, algae'd. The walls are plain and curve into their corners like sighs, like they're taking their time. 

There is a wash closet next to the door. He rinses out his mouth, scrubs his face and neck and armpits, then dresses in yesterday's trousers. It's already so hot he can't bear the thought quite yet of putting on a shirt. Barechested, he pads out of the room into the main house.

He imagines he can still feel Poe against him, touching him, tracing out a geography of shared need. He needs to _focus_.

Past the common space, he can hear clinking and humming and another voice, deeper (he thinks) than Poe's. The dining and kitchen area opens out onto a veranda, curtained by nets. A large, silver-haired man sits at one end of the small table, chewing and talking simultaneously.

Before Finn can turn around--he should put on a shirt!--BB-8 comes trundling toward him, chirping, his antenna quivering.

"That you?" Poe calls, stepping backwards into view. "Finn?"

"Indeed it is!" BB-8 answers for him, circling Finn's calves before speeding back ahead. 

"Morning," Finn says, stepping onto the veranda.

The old man shakes his head and tosses a round green fruit at Finn's chest. "Sit, son, you look half-starved."

"He really doesn't," Poe says before Finn can reply. "You just think everyone should eat to bursting."

"I do," the man says, grinning and shovelling another mouthful of beans and vegetables into his mouth. He says something else, but Finn can't make it out through the food.

"Kes," Poe says, touching his father's shoulder, then pointing at Finn. "Finn, Kes. Kes, Finn."

"Nice to meet you," Finn says carefully as he takes a seat. He sets the fruit in front of him, unsure if he should eat it as is, try to peel it, or what. 

"Finally!" Kes replies. "Beginning to think you were a figment of this one's imagination." He elbows Poe in the hip and laughs at his own joke. "That is, aside from all the holo footage of you and your heroics, which he is nowhere near smart enough to fake."

Poe turns from the cooker with a platter he hands to Finn. He rubs his palms on the sides of his legs before straddling a stool.

"Sleep okay?" he asks Finn.

"I did, thanks," Finn says, studying the food in front of him before looking back up. "This looks delicious."

"Looks don't count for shit," Kes puts in. "It's about the taste."

"He's not wrong," Poe says and hands Finn some utensils. "Dig in."

"What about you?"

"Ate already," Poe says briefly, rising, taking one of Kes's plates and placing it in the broad, shallow sink. He must have been up for a while; Finn sees himself, still asleep, through Poe's eyes, and wonders what he saw.

Finn is much hungrier than he realized, and Poe, it seems, is an excellent cook. While Finn works through second helpings of everything, Poe peels the green fruit and splits it, handing half to his father before biting off an enormous section for himself.

He swats away a few insects looking to taste the juice on his mouth. Finn watches him, half-wondering what Poe is thinking. Neither of them wants to _talk_ , but that doesn't mean they don't have to, and soon. Yet he thinks he'd probably be content to watch Poe suck on the fruit and bicker with his dad for a good long time.

"What brings you around?" Kes asks. Behind him, Poe scowls a little.

He might as well forget about domestic daydreams.

"I need your help," Finn says.

"What, a pilot?" Poe sounds a little bitter. Kes laughs.

"Yes, among other things. I think I found her," Finn says when it's quiet again. "Leia."

Poe's reaction is nothing like what Finn expected. His shoulders seem to snap and sag; he looks away and down. He is quiet and shadowed, half hidden in the dark.

"When do we leave?" Kes asks, rising from the table. "Let's get a fucking move on."

*

Poe loves Yavin, fiercely, with something twined through his sinews, but then again, he loves wherever he is. As the shuttle lifts out of atmosphere, he sits forward. The artificial gravity kicks in, and he beams.


End file.
